Michael D. Warner

Seymour H. Knox Professor of English; Professor of American Studies. Intensely engaged with a project to integrate his study of American literature-Puritan sermons, Civil War era poetry of Melville and Whitman, etc., with social and political theorizing about the nature of the public sphere, Habermas, Fraser, Charles Taylor et al. His Letters of the Republic (1990) established his reputation at this intersection. Since he tacked between a series of editions of Puritan sermons, glossed with sophisticated, sociohistorically informed commentaries, or literary oeuvres like Whitman's on the one hand, and his own writings as a critical theorist of the contemporary political public sphere, and particularly of the identity politics so frequently bound up with it. Work, especially The Trouble with Normal (1999) and Publics and Counterpublics (2002) and volumes such as Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (1993) kept him in the forefront of contemporary debates among LGBTQ activists. Fired by his intense engagement with political theory, he has addressed issues of secularism in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age with Calhoun and VanAntwerpen (2010) and also in his Rosenbach Lectures (2009) at Penn. Considered to be one of the founders of Queer Theroy.